Chris Jericho Describes How He Fooled Us All With Fake Avenged Sevenfold Album Info Leak

Chris Jericho, you played us like fools! And you know what we do with people who throw us for a loop? Huh?!? Jericho… you just made the list!

Though the Fozzy frontman and wrestling legend will forever be a part of the List of Loudwire, he certainly deserves a world of credit for playing an integral part in Avenged Sevenfold’s surprise album release. On a new episode of the Talk Is Jericho podcast, Chris described in detail how he and M. Shadows cooked up the bait which every media outlet took a bite of.

I’m taking a little bit of credit for being able to keep this record secret, ‘The Stage.’ Because their plan was always to just drop it with no announcement, no warning, but they always knew that it could leak, cause that’s just the world we live in.

So about the time we recorded this podcast, about a month ago, Shadows and I were talking about it and he was afraid it was going to get leaked, it was going to get spoiled—that the whole surprise was going to get spoiled.

So I came up with an idea and I was like, ‘Dude, why don’t you let me post a fake release date on my Instagram and then I’ll take it down a couple days later as if I screwed up. And like took some information and posted it that I wasn’t supposed to and that way people will think the record is coming out on a certain date, you know, months after the real release date. Kind of plant a real cool red herring to throw people off the scent.’

And Shadows thought that was a great idea so. So I guess a couple of weeks ago Shadows called me and said, ‘We’re starting to feel the heat, we need to post this release date.’ So I had him send me a meme of the Avenged Sevenfold deathbat and we decided on the date of Dec. 9, 2016. So I just posted… this Deathbat with Dec. 9, 2016 and then I put a hashtag of ‘#voltaicoceans’ which people were then deciding that would be the name of the record, ‘Voltaic Oceans,‘ is out Dec. 9, 2016.’

And then I pulled it a couple hours later after posting it and suddenly it went viral. Loudwire was talking about it, Metal Injection, Blabbermouth, Metal Hammer, everybody was talking about how ‘I think Chris Jericho screwed up and posted something he wasn’t supposed to and told the world that the new Avenged Sevenfold record ‘Voltaic Oceans‘ is coming out Dec. 9, 2016.’

So that kind of put a huge smokescreen up for people to think, ‘Well, the record is coming out, we know that. The new single ‘The Stage‘ came out about a week ago or whatever it was, two weeks ago.’ But everyone knows when the record is coming out because Jericho posted it.

Meanwhile I made up the whole thing. ‘Voltaic Oceans,’ I just made it up. And the reason was at first I was going to call the record ‘Warmonger,’ and I thought that was a little bit generic. So, I had been listening to The Cult and they have a song on their ‘Electric‘ record that’s called ‘Electric Ocean.’

And I thought ‘Electric Ocean‘ sounds pretty cool—sounds like something that Avenged Sevenfold would call one of their records. But then I thought let me see if I can find another word for electric. So I Googled thesaurus.com and found that voltaic is another word for electric and I’m like, ‘That’s perfect!’ ‘Voltaic Oceans,‘ Dec. 9, 2016.

So if you go online and Google ‘Voltaic Oceans,’ there’s a Wikipedia page setup that talks about ‘Voltaic Oceans‘ is Avenged Sevenfold‘s seventh record and it’s coming out Dec. 9, 2016. And it worked too perfectly, I felt like…Colonel Hannibal in ‘A-Team‘ when he goes: ‘I love it when a plan comes together,’ and he chomps on his cigar.

It worked so perfectly, we fooled everybody. We were the masters of puppets pulling the strings for all of the media and throwing everybody off the scent of ‘The Stage.’

Meanwhile, I think last night—24 hours before the record was released—finally, somebody found a copy in the store. Because that’s one of the things is that when you’re going to drop a record completely online, you can keep it a secret.

But when you have physical copies as well, which needed to be ready to be in the stores for Friday. But there’s been boxes of CD’s for days in warehouses and record stores—if there’s any such thing as record stores nowadays. But nobody figured it out and then finally yesterday, somebody found a copy of the record, posted a picture of the album, posted a picture of the album title, the album cover and all the songs on the back.

But to think about that, a three-year process where this record was done months and months and months ago and we were all able to keep it secret up until one day before the record came out. And I bet you a lot of people didn’t even realize that ’cause not everybody reads online or goes online.

So we were able to keep it secret with the smokescreen of ‘Voltaic Oceans.‘ I think Avenged Sevenfold is now going to make a t-shirt of ‘Voltaic Oceans,‘ kind of the lost Avenged Sevenfold record.

So that’s how IT all happened. Much respect to Chris Jericho and Avenged Sevenfold for pulling a fast one. Listen to the latest edition of Talk is Jericho with special guests Avenged Sevenfold. As you know by now, Avenged's new album, The Stage, is now available wherever music is sold.

Listen to Chris Jericho's Podcast in Which He Discusses Avenged Sevenfold

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